What’s In a Diagnosis?

An academic in Canada has found a few dozen people around the world who desire to mutilate or disfigure themselves because they feel they are wrongly abled. According to Dalrymple, it won’t be long before these people claim it is wrong both to regard them as abnormal (for who is to say what is normal?) and to withhold from them the special treatment and attention that are conferred by right on those having an approved disorder.

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One thought on “What’s In a Diagnosis?”

Fall in Religion=Rise in Relativism
At the risk of coming under cyber attack, I have decided to comment on this! I think that Dr Dalrymple is alluding to conditions such as gender dysphoria in this piece. Personally I consider that the etiology of such disturbance is psychological in origin due to early childhood and family of origin influences. I don’t believe people are born into the “wrong” body. Human beings are the most adaptable of all creatures and it is clear from a perusal of history or anthropology that many constructs around gender are culturally determined. Let’s try a thought experiment, of the type beloved of the movie industry. What if tomorrow we woke up to inhabit the body of the opposite sex, practical considerations aside, would we be able to adapt and continue functioning? I inhabit a body which has gone through five pregnancies and natural births, and spent nearly six years breastfeeding these children, and just recently experienced the menopause. However I think and feel that if tomorrow I woke up to find myself in a man’s body, beside the annoyance of having to shave( and given current fashion for bushy beards I probably wouldn’t worry) after a transition period I would be able to adapt and generally continue to function at the same level as previously. Maybe it is because I believe we all have a human soul which does not have a gender attached to it, so do not need to identify myself primarily on the basis of gender.